48 pages • 1 hour read
Anderson Cooper, Katherine HoweVanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty
Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Key Figures
Cornelius Vanderbilt
Born in 1794, the patriarch of the family, Cornelius Vanderbilt, built the Vanderbilt family fortune. Of the Commodore (Vanderbilt’s nickname), Cooper writes in the Introduction that he “was a tough businessman and an unforgiving father and that, when he died, he was the richest person in America” (xiv). The Commodore was a hard-working striver, full of ambition. He earned two fortunes: the first from operating ferries and steamships, the second from owning railroad lines.
He was domineering and could be harsh on his children. He called his son Billy a blatherskite, but in the end, he favored him when it came to dispensing his millions. His son Cornelius Jeremiah never received the parental love he needed. He had epilepsy, which the Commodore considered a weakness and an embarrassment. He also lacked the business acumen of his father, a further strike against him. As for the Commodore’s many daughters, he considered them a step below their brothers since they could not carry on the Vanderbilt name. He provided for them modestly in his will but left the vast majority of his money to Billy.
The authors write little about his actual business dealings aside from his early years running ferries. The book instead focuses on the Vanderbilts’ lives as individuals, and in this context the Commodore is portrayed as stern but hard-working. He was not given to wasting his money, as would be his heirs. He spent it judiciously, without fanfare. While he built a comfortable house in fashionable Washington Square, he remained satisfied with it for decades and had no desire to build lavish summer homes, for example. He continued working into old age, when ill health forced him to remain housebound for the last year or so of his life. The Commodore died in 1877.
Alva Vanderbilt
Born in 1853, Alva Vanderbilt (later Belmont) was married to Billy’s son William Kissam Vanderbilt, known as Willie. She represents a strong figure among the family members, being the main person to push the Vanderbilts onto center stage in New York society, among the first women in her set to seek a divorce, and a pioneer in the fight for women’s rights, particularly suffrage. Her famous ball, which she used to challenge society doyenne Caroline Astor, is the focus of Chapter 5. Through sheer resolve and cunning strategy, she forced Astor to accept the Vanderbilts as peers.
Later, her divorce was seen as a watershed for women of her class. It was so risky to pursue that even her divorce lawyer tried to talk her out of it. However, she pushed through, resolute in this as well, and triumphed in the end. She received a large settlement that included $2.3 million, alimony, and two enormous homes, the Fifth Avenue mansion called the Petit Chateau and the summer home known as the Marble House (costing $310 million in today’s money). This same strong will, however, had a negative side: Her relationship with her daughter Consuelo suffered because she forced Consuelo into an unwanted marriage.
Later in life, Alva became known for her work promoting women’s rights. She remarried, to Willie’s best friend Oliver Belmont, and used her fame and wealth to agitate for women’s right to vote. She founded a soup kitchen in New York City for impoverished women and marched in demonstrations in support of suffrage. Alva died in Paris, France, on January 26, 1933. In 2016, the building that had long served as the headquarters of the National Woman’s Party in Washington, D.C., was designated a national monument and named partly in her honor: The Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument.
Gloria Vanderbilt
Gloria Vanderbilt is co-author Anderson Cooper’s mother and a great-great-granddaughter of the Commodore. She was born in 1924 to Reggie Vanderbilt and his second wife, Gloria Morgan. The defining event of her early years, and perhaps her entire life, was the custody battle waged when she was 10 years old between her mother and her aunt, Gertrude Vanderbilt. The judge found for her aunt, and her mother was given visitation rights. It marked their relationship, which over time dwindled to becoming almost nonexistent.
Gloria Vanderbilt was married four times, her last husband being Wyatt Emory Cooper, Anderson’s father. She knew heartache and loss throughout her life, from her early, unsettling years as a child to enduring the loss of her 23-year-old son Carter to suicide. She was a prominent socialite for years, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, and close friends with author Truman Capote until he portrayed her negatively in his last book. Her share of the Vanderbilt fortune dissipated over time, but she made millions on her own from her line of jeans. Whatever money she did have, she eventually spent, always living beyond her means in true Vanderbilt style.
Her role in the book is to act as a kind of conduit to the distant Vanderbilt past. Cooper writes that he had little interest in his famous family’s history for many years. As his mother grew older, however, they began discussing her life and her family more. He refers to her as the “last Vanderbilt,” in the sense that she was the last to live her life in the public eye and was born before the Depression, when the Vanderbilts still had a kind of mythical status as quasi-aristocrats in America. She died in 2019, two years before this book was published.
Anderson Cooper
Cooper is the co-author and a member of the Vanderbilt family on his mother’s side. He is a longtime journalist, currently with CNN, and hosts his own nightly TV show called Anderson Cooper 360°. He lends the book a personal touch, writing in the first person at times, particularly in the last chapter where he discusses his relationship with his mother. He keeps a certain detachment from the Vanderbilt family, both as author and individual. He writes in the Introduction:
I’ve always gone out of my way to avoid mentioning my relation to the Vanderbilts. When someone would find out and ask me, ‘What was it like to grow up a Vanderbilt?’ my response was always the same. ‘I don’t know,’ I’d say. ‘I’m a Cooper.’ That is how I viewed myself, and still do. (xiv)
As both he and Gloria grew older, however, he wanted to know more about his mother’s family. They began corresponding by email, in which he asked her things they had never discussed; this was eventually published in book form. When she died, he began going through her personal effects and papers, which spurred him to learn more so he might pass on this knowledge to his own children. He now has two sons, Wyatt Morgan Cooper, born in 2020, and Sebastian Luke Maisani-Cooper, born in 2022.
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